Grown Ups

by Emma Jane Unsworth

  “Me and you? Hah! I mean a proper relationship. A romantic relationship.”

  “Romantic. God help you,” she said.

  But she did have a few relationships, years ago—relationships in which she invested enough to be jealous. Are you sitting comfortably? I’ll begin anyway.

  A long time ago, back in the days when love was still analog, my mother knew a man named Roger. Roger the Theater Producer, to give him his full title. And you really must, with men like that, or there’s simply no point to them. Like most of my mother’s men, Roger was married and lived in London, but he traveled a lot. The first night he stayed I came down feigning a headache, a thirst, I was feverish (with curiosity). I was thirteen.

  She was in the kitchen fixing something long and cool. He was short and hot.

  He started at the sight of me, white-gowned in the doorway. “Oh, hello! You must be Jenny.”

  I nodded and went to sit at the end of the sofa, beside the coiled cobra lamp that was my mother’s most beloved possession. I smiled at Roger expectantly. I had things to learn. I liked the way his arms looked in his short-sleeved shirt. I was at an age when I still trusted muscles.

  “How old are you?” I asked.

  “Forty.”

  “Wow.” So vastly, impossibly ancient. He looked smart and rich and like he’d been around all the blocks. I hadn’t even been around our block. I tucked my feet up and sat, knees making a rhombus—greeting him, and all exciting men, everywhere!

  I heard the glasses she was holding tinkle. I didn’t turn. I sat there, eyes on Roger’s eyes, waiting, counting. Two seconds, three. Her hands clamped onto my shoulders. She hauled me out to the hall.

  “You’re too old to sit like that.”

  She wanted me to cry. I wanted to cheer. I suppose because I felt like we were finally on the edge of something real. She wasn’t protecting me with her anger—not like when I ran near the road or went missing in shops. There was fear in her eyes along with the anger, I could see that, but there was also a third emotion—one she wasn’t comfortable with, but one she couldn’t suppress. Aha! Ahaha! Oh, the pitiless epiphanies of the child confronting the threshold guardian. She was my end-of-level boss, the obstacle between me and some higher plane, some outside; and I would defeat her eventually, and she knew it. Those spurts of golden growth—they come like sailors, giving everything, taking everything.

  And then one day, Roger stopped coming.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “It ran its course,” my mother said. “As all relationships with men should.”

  I looked in her eyes for the lie. She stared back, like she always did, with her eyes folded. I’d looked into her eyes so many times, in real life and in photographs, trying to do a sort of past-life regression on myself. And what of my mother’s childhood?

  The McLaine Sisters were four redheaded sisters, my mother being the eldest by three years. Even my grandparents saw their children as a novelty—they made them sing together in competitions on holiday in Rhyl, Blackpool, and other such seaside towns. My mother said they lined up in a row onstage, like the von Trapps. They wore black jodhpurs and white blouses and gray waistcoats, like four little horsewomen. (“Not my first rodeo,” my mother says, every time she’s about to go onstage.) They usually won, but when they didn’t it rather ruined the holiday. My mother still throws out a tune when she has a drink in her. She’s what you might call a loose karaoke cannon.

  “What does your mother do?” the kids asked at school.

  “She’s an actress,” I said.

  She still did her vocal exercises every night. She rewatched her appearances in obscure soaps (Under the Doctor) and low-rent biopics (Shelly’s Shame). She had a bedroom that was more of a boudoir. When my friends came round she tried to correct their pronunciation and gave them instructions on voice projection and vocal preparation—Breathe deeply from your lower lungs, imagine a rubber ring around your waist, and try to push the ring outward as you breathe in. Shoulders down, breathe in through your nose, out through your nose and mouth. Bend your knees—not THAT much, you look like you’re on the toilet.… Relax! RELAX!

  We had hot holidays. A twenty-inch TV. I swanned around school in my Clarks Magic Steps with the hidden key in the heel. I used to drive with her on the Manchester ring road, to and from the satellite towns where she performed: Sale, Altrincham, Eccles, Weaste. Me, riding shotgun, solemn as a priestess. I used to saunter into those clubs and pubs, those half-done places that smelled of stale beer and freshly sawn wood. I saw the staff and punters nudging each other. There, look, it’s her. The Daughter. The One.

  And so that night at the restaurant, I watched her carefully with Art. The way she straightened his napkin for him, pleased on a helpless level, and it was like seeing her smooth the tie of someone who’d never existed. She was relieved. She didn’t have to worry I was going to be left stranded. I’d met a man, a socially mobile, upward man, and she, for all her old feminist foot-bones, could relax on account of the fact I had safely—finally (that shelf was getting dusty!)—entered some version of adulthood.

  INT. YOUNG JENNY’S BEDROOM

  Night. A single bed with a rainbow-patterned duvet cover. A rug. A full bookshelf. A bedside lamp on. Everything small and infused with hope. Jenny is in bed. Carmen is pacing the room, reading from a book.

  CARMEN

  [overemphasizing]

  “Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be OUTRAGEOUS. Go the WHOLE HOG. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it’s UNBELIEVABLE.”

  Jenny picks at a patch of loose paint on the wall. Carmen stops reading.

  CARMEN

  Right, that’s it.

  JENNY

  What?

  CARMEN

  You’re not listening!

  JENNY

  I am!

  CARMEN

  Do you know how much people pay to come and see me these days?

  JENNY

  A million pounds.

  CARMEN

  Seven fifty with booking fee.

  JENNY

  Wow.

  CARMEN

  Look. I’ve worked a long day after a long night and I’m off to work again as soon as Aunty Bev gets here and I’m trying to make precious time for my daughter and she could not care less.

  JENNY

  I was listening.

  CARMEN

  You weren’t! You couldn’t give a monkey’s. Here I am, giving it my all. TO THE WALL.

  JENNY

  [quietly]

  You’re overdoing it.

  CARMEN

  What did you say?

  JENNY

  Again.

  CARMEN

  [huffing]

  It’s drama, darling. It requires voices.

  JENNY

  It’s Roald Dahl.

  Carmen throws down the book and storms out of the room.

  Jenny sighs, rolls over, switches her lamp off, and begins to masturbate.

  IN THE WINGS

  We were at the Mind Body Spirit show at the Birmingham NEC. I stood behind the partition wall, watching her doing her thing onstage—plucking people from the audience and giving them messages from beyond. I was drinking a cup of lemonade. She was grandstanding. She was majestic.

  “She says she’ll see you for the dancing, pet, can you accept that … ?

  “She said you were there by her side the whole time, and your love let her know she could go. Can you accept that, my love? … You can. Thank you. Bless you.…”

  When she’d finished, the applause was deafening. The crowd demanded an encore. At one point she looked to the side and winked at me, and I got a thrill so electrifying it made me judder. I blew bubbles into my lemonade. Lemonade spilled over the rim of my cup, onto the gray top of the temporary stage block. The stage manager told me off and sent someone for a cloth, but I didn’t care, I was too busy watching my mother, in midflow, bowing and smiling and saying thank you,
soaking it all up. I wanted to capture that sight of her, preserve it forever, that scene. I remember thinking the sentence to myself: You are mine, all mine.

  When she got offstage, we walked around the festival together. It was a goblin market. We stopped at a stall called the Horned Goddess selling dream catchers, angel cards, and gemstones. It stank of joss sticks. My mother was wearing her full regalia. A child jumped away from her: “Mummy, that lady’s scaring me!”

  My mother affected a look of horror. “I’m not a lady!”

  We stopped by a small gypsy caravan. MADAME AURACLE: AURA READINGS AND MORE, it said on the side.

  “Do you want your aura reading?” my mother asked.

  “If it’s all right, I’d rather have a jacket potato with coleslaw,” I said.

  “Come on,” she said, “after this.”

  In the caravan there was a photo studio of sorts set up in the lounge: A Polaroid camera on a tripod. A sectioned-off area under a curtain.

  The madame was sitting on a tasseled stool. She was as wide as she was high and dripping in turquoise. “I am Madame Auracle,” she said.

  I sat in the electric chair, awaiting my execution. The assistant was wearing a baggy olive-green T-shirt. She instructed me to place my hands on the metal plates on either side of the chair. I obeyed her because she looked like Christina Ricci, and I would have done anything for Christina Ricci. She stood in front of me with the camera. “Smile!” I obliged.

  A few seconds later, the photo chugged out of the camera. I peered at the picture. I looked startled and stern, like a constipated headmistress in an Adidas T-shirt who had farted a rainbow.

  “Now for the reading.” Madame Auracle took the photo in her hand and raised her eyebrows. “Lots of red … You are an enthusiastic and energetic individual, forever on the lookout for new adventures. You are quick to anger and can lose your temper over the smallest thing. You are generous with your time and energy when called upon for help. You are easily bored.”

  “She won’t even sit still to watch a film,” my mother said.

  Madame Auracle continued: “And so now we come to the other side of your personality—we have lots of yellow here. The yellow part of your aura represents the highly critical part of you. But those who have high standards, that exacting voice inside that is so harsh on the world and others, that same voice is even harsher when it turns on you, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” my mother said, “definitely. She has VERY high standards.”

  I nodded.

  “And if you were easier on yourself, then you might find it easier to allow others to love you for who you are.”

  “Too true,” my mother said.

  Madame Auracle nodded sagely. “Your main fault is that you can be overly analytical. And this creates a fear that makes you unable to communicate openly and freely.”

  I said, “Sounds like a lot of people I know, to be honest.”

  Madame coughed. “That concludes the reading. Most auras stretch three feet around the physical body; however, if you’re a trauma survivor your aura stretches fifty feet around you—which means people around you on the bus will be sitting in it. Your mother will be sitting in it. We’ll all be sitting in it, right now. Your aura mess. I can clean it up for you for an extra five pounds ninety-nine.”

  I shook my head.

  “You should have a quick clean,” my mother said.

  “I’m not traumatized.”

  THEY SAY

  you should never look at the comments. That to go “below the line” is to open the portal to death and damnation. BTL = the Gateway to Hell. I say, that kind of self-control is for the healthy of mind and heart. Meanwhile, you’ll find me shrieking and wallowing in the lake of digital hellfire with all the worst people on the Internet. Waving, drowning, backstroke, who knows what I’m doing—but I’m not for being saved. Come on in! The water’s … excruciating.

  My column goes up around 4 p.m., for bored souls on the homeward commute. In that way, you could say it’s asking for trouble. I sit at my desk and refresh the comments over and over. Nice, nice, nice, nice—my brain trips over these like they’re just air, like they’re nothing, like they’re fuck you what are you trying to do be my friend?—then—ah!

  A mean one.

  I read it over and over, savoring it.

  OVERPRIVILEGED VANITY PUFF PIECE—DOUBT MUCH OF THIS IS ACTUALLY TRUE

  I feel the words like holy fire. I am vanquished, but also victorious. They are right! This person understands me completely! (Maybe they’re the secret love of my life??) I knew I was heinous and here is the proof! Let me burn! Let the flaming be righteous! I deserve it. I deserve it all. Moar!

  Three times you mention your weight in one article. Seek help.

  MOARRRRRR.

  I hope you die

  Oooh! Old school. Satisfying on a basic level.

  Another, somewhat on theme:

  Maybe you should start writing something more appropriate like obituaries

  I ponder this. I do like thinking about death, so it’s not a terrible idea. I think about my own death approximately once a day. I don’t think about the actual moment of dying; I think about my own autopsy. Or I think about the person, or people, who’ll discover my body. I hope they will be beautiful, and weep tenderly. I think beautiful people weeping tenderly over your dead body is one of the very loveliest thoughts a human can have.

  A little way down the thread, I see a comment from Sid. She has written:

  How could you do this?? Do I get financial recompense for this exposure of details from my private life? Great piece tho babe! X

  I panic. What if Mia sees the comment and deduces that I am no longer living with Art and in actual fact living with AT LEAST ONE WOMAN? My palms sweat. Could I go over to the tech woman and ask her to delete the comment? Or would that make things too obvious? I should have access to my own comments, surely! I’m wide open here. It’s not right.

  I call the elevator, but when it arrives there are a few people in there, so I smile politely and walk away because the last thing I want is a conversation. As soon as I am on the stairs I am on my phone again.

  I sit on the Tube, scrolling—harried, fraught, and febrile.

  * * *

  Nicolette is waiting for me outside the Yoga Shed, sucking on her vape. Nicolette looks like a Russian supermodel: rail-thin with puce-tipped hair. She always smells of apple mint. She is a new friend, even though I swore off those when I hit thirty-five. We met at a fancy dress party a few months ago—a friend-of-a-friend’s thirtieth. The theme was 1988. I went as Garfield and Nicolette was Jessica Rabbit. My costume was sweltering and I’d just had a Brazilian so was doing neat, dry, rasping farts. I was timing them admirably with the music. I saw a woman who looked like she was concentrating too. What secrets did she have in her pants? I moved toward her in stages, casual, doing a humble smile when she caught my eye. I stood next to her and it was like slotting into a puzzle I’d been trying to finish for a while. I asked her how she knew the birthday boy and she said: “Oh, I’m just staying here taking coke until I despise myself sufficiently to leave.” I knew then that this was a person I could really learn from. Not least because the times I have taken drugs I’ve immediately lost my cool. I have no discretion. I get too agitated. One time when I was with a group of people in a pub awaiting a delivery of pills, when the man with the baggie arrived, I shouted “PILL!” across the pub, instead of his name, Chris. Like I said, super cool. You all want to go to Ibiza with me.

  The night we met, Nicolette instantly started following me on everything, even Pinterest. She didn’t slide into my DMs; she galloped. Talk about chutzpah. “Reply All” should really be an adjective, and Nicolette is very Reply All. I’d had a few drinks and liked her energy, so I didn’t even do the wait-an-hour-to-look-casual thing (the equivalent of waiting three days after a date before you contact them): I went Full Fast Follow Back. I wanted her to see how fast I could love her too. She was mine and
I was hers and we both sensed it. We’ve had to talk, though, about the way we heat up and cool off on each other’s needs when we’ve been in physical proximity, because sometimes it does get intense, like we’re trying to bridge some sort of divide we didn’t feel when we were actually together.

  Nicolette used to write for lefty rags, but now she writes interior design features mostly. I guess it’s true: we all get more right-wing as we age. Over the past few months, our friendship has worked its way past desperate cordiality to a place of real assault.

  She’s wearing an antique wedding dress festooned with lace, teamed with tracksuit bottoms and leather boots. It’s a look that screams Sporty Loyal Cossack. We hug. “You look crackerjack,” I say.

  “I was unsure when I left the house, but you know when you want positive affirmation on the things you’re wearing? Go to the old girls.”

  “Define old ?”

  “Sixty or seventy, yah. If I get a wink or a nod off an old girl on the street, I know I’m doing it right. And I got about six on the way here, so.”

  Nicolette lines up the angles of her face with the outside of the building. “Come in,” she says, beckoning me toward her without moving. “Come in with me.”

  “I’m not looking so hot.”

  “Black and white makes it all all right.”

  I stand next to her and smile, lips no teeth because that’s how I feel. I look at Nicolette’s fingertips gripping the phone—her grown-out gel manicure is pleasantly prostitute-y. She takes the shot and posts it. I wonder whether to do one too, but my hesitation—as always—costs me momentum. Nicolette and I have discussed social media—being, as it is, a major obsession within both our lives. We have categorized users, ourselves included: likers, nonlikers (stealth users), tactical likers, and the Truly Sound of Mind. I am more honest with Nicolette than I am with anyone else, even Kelly—which is strange for someone I have known a relatively short amount of time. I suppose it’s a different kind of honest. I just let my mouth run. In my lighter moments, it is because I adore her. In my darker, it is because I know that I have nothing to lose by her disapproval.